Movies
Primal (VOD)
“For all others and in all fairness, Primal is just crap. It’s that simple. Kill the hype now!”
I liked Wolf Creek just as much as the next guy. I liked Rogue even better. But those two flicks doesn’t mean that Australia is a new breeding ground for well-executed and all-round awesome horror-flicks. Quite the contrary, as films like Red Hill, Road Train and Primal have now shown. I’m saying this because the success of Greg McLean’s two lean films (bad pun intended) is the only source I can possibly think of for the hype that has surrounded Primal since it’s earliest teasing tidbits surfaced online.
Why the fuck anyone would buy into the hype after watching the trailer is completely beyond me, but even though that’s been out for ages people are apparently still looking forward to this crapfest. Stop! Stop now! Primal plays out like nothing more than a weak episode of the X-Files sans the FBI. The premise is kinda cool, the execution is awful and every single time the movie gears up to show some balls it eventually chickens out leaving it all the more frustrating. The only redeeming factor here is that the storyline gets so ridiculous and nonsensical towards the end that Primal ends up as a so-horribly-bad-you-have-to-laugh kinda film.
So, yeah, in case you haven’t seen the trailer and have gotten the entire storyline delivered to you there, the film goes something like this: Six friends are camping and gearing up for sex in the Australian outback. They decide they have to walk through an old cave, that we know to be dangerous because we’ve seen the opening scene where an aboriginal caveman gets attacked by some false teeth and a loud noise. Having passed through the evil cave one of the hot chicks decides to skinny dip in an evil lake which causes her to grow some false teeth of her own and attack her friends while making loud noises.
From here on it’s one terribly executed scene after another. From the guys and gals arguing over who get’s to kill the next guy who’s infected by the monster-virus to the unintentionally funny “fights” and “jumps” and all the way through to the amazingly stupid climax of bad CGI. The most frustrating thing about Primal, though, isn’t the nonsense of the dialogue, the fact that it features the single most annoying character I can recall or the unintentional comedy of the gore and action scenes. No, the one thing that really pissed me off, is that every time the script actually sports an interesting idea or intriguing concept, the filmmakers back out and don’t follow through. I mean, it’s a cool idea, that the primitive monster-people should have animalistic sex, but when it’s plainly obvious that they’re still wearing shorts, then the scene won’t have the emotional punch it apparently still has on the annoying guy. Primal is littered with these moments that could have worked, had the filmmakers had the chops to follow through.
Once I realized that this wasn’t a well-executed tale of panic and desperation, nor an ironic piece of genre-cinema (there’s a lot of Cabin Fever in here actually) – once I realized it was just badly acted crap – I started laughing. And thank bejesus for that! ‘Cause once you start laughing, the last 30 minutes are so over the top ridiculous, I actually left the cinema with a smile on my face instead of the horrible feeling of wasting my time that should have been there. I guess I’d only recommend this to people who enjoy watching filmmakers fail. For all others and in all fairness, Primal is just crap. It’s that simple. Kill the hype now!
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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